Navigation

Books

House Keys Not Handcuffs:
Homeless Organizing, Art and Politics in San Francisco and Beyond.

Written by Paul Boden with additional essays
by friends and longtime allies, Art Hazelwood and Bob Prentice. It
includes 67 images created by printmakers, painters, muralists,
cartoonists and photographers giving a history of the art made in the
struggle.

House Keys Not Handcuffs is a reflection on over 30 years of homeless
organizing in San Francisco. It is an attempt to sort out what went
well and what did not as a community begins to organize in order to hold
public and private institutions accountable. Its purpose is not only
to distill the lessons we have learned, but to encourage others to
document and reflect on their own experiences in the hope that we can
collectively contribute to a stronger, more broadly-based movement.
Artwork has always been a vital part of this organizing.

The book draws from the insights of Paul Boden, whose own experiences
on the street as an activist, and as a co-founder of the Coalition on
Homelessness and later, the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP),
give him a unique and wide perspective. It is a voice for people who
have no power or privilege except for their capacity to organize and
demand social justice.

“American Day Dream could become a
classic like 1984 or Brave New World.”
—Jim Smith, The Venice Beachhead

“A great dystopian read that takes you on a journey around the
streets and scenic marvels of San Francisco. More than an Orwellian
dystopia, American Daydream draws on the revelations of Edward Snowden,
imagining where the National Security might be leading us in the future.
Added to this mélange is a passionate romance between the two main
characters, the utopian counter point of the story.”
—Roger Burbach, author of Fire in the Americas

“Margot Pepper’s literary incursion into Science Fiction is just like
her—daring, brave and fully imagined. She is a story goddess living in
and out of verses, whose political stance is vital and necessary.”
—Luis J. Rodriguez, author of Always Running and It Calls You Back

"Voice of Fire presents the critical communiqués and perspectives of the first guerrilla movement to emerge in Latin America in the post-Cold War era. This book puts us inside the minds of Indigenous peoples and Mexicans who are raising fundamental questions about the current political and social order in North America. Subcomandante Marcos' commentaries are written with a passion and commitment reminiscent of Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America."Roger Burbach
Author of Fire in the Americas

"The Zapatistas bring much needed fresh ideas to the world's progressive and indigenous rights movements. Their civil society strategy, which rejects both vanguardism and narrow ethnic nationalism, appears to have been remarkably successful in a short period of time. This collection of their own writings is a must read for anyone concerned with Mexico in particular and progressive movements in general."Peter Rossett, Ph.D.
Executive Director, Institute for Food and Development Policy

"The spectacular January first EZLN uprising was a cry 500 years in the making. It has unleashed a torrent of discontent that will mark the unraveling of the ruling party's stranglehold on Mexican politics for the past six decades. The future face of Mexico is as unknown as the faces behind the rebel's masks, but the chiseled features of Mexico's Indians will no longer be merely reminders of the past. Thanks to the EZLN, they will now shape Mexico's future. This collection of EZLN writings is key to understanding what that future holds."Medea Benjamin
Co-Director, Global Exchange

"If the lie returns to the mouth of the powerful our voice of fire will speak again..."Communiqué of the EZLN, February 16,1994

Hobos to Street People offers a comparison of the culture and politics of
homelessness as seen through artwork since the Great Depression. The
book is based on the touring exhibition of the same name that first
opened in early 2009-the time of the greatest economic downturn since
the 1929 Stock Market Crash. As the numbers of people living in poverty
continues to swell, this book looks to the past for lessons for today. A
wide range of artists have brought attention to the issue, including
historical figures such as Rockwell Kent, Fritz Eichenberg, Jacob Burck,
Dorothea Lange and contemporary artists Kiki Smith, Sandow Birk, Eric
Drooker and many more. The text, written by artist and curator Art
Hazelwood, places the artwork within the history of social and political
responses from the New Deal, through McCarthyism, to the rise of modern
homelessness in the 1980s. Sections of the book focus on different
aspects of homelessness including day to day life, displacement, rural
poverty and political struggle. Emphasis is also given to the means by
which artists have been able to get their message out whether through
publications, government programs of the New Deal, street posters,
exhibitions, or alliances with activist groups.

A portion of the proceeds from the sales of the books will be donated to homeless advocacy groups. Donors can direct the donation using the comment box above. (enter: WRAP, COH or Spirit)

The book is based on the traveling exhibition of the same name.The exhibition began at the California Historical Society in San
Francisco in February of 2009. California Exhibition Resources Alliance (CERA) is the touring
company. The next exhibition date for the tour will be listed below if/when scheduled.

"Sugaree Rising is a remarkable first novel, intelligent, sensitive,
thoughtful, perceptive. It is the story of a small, tightly knit,
interrelated group of South Carolina Blacks who established their own
community after the Civil War. They bring with them the traditional
beliefs of their slave ancestors, the old ways and the old gods. In the
South Carolina of the 1930 their descendants still honor the traditions
of their African forefathers, living their days in essentially parallel
universes, the everyday and the spiritual, both real, both shifting back
and forth like a kaleidoscope. It is an extraordianarily exhilarating
way of perceiving the world."

In this collection of interviews with one of the central poets of the San Francisco Literary Renaissance (which preceded the Beat movement) William Everson/Brother Antoninus ponders the mystical dimensions of poetry. The interviews span the final fifteen years of his life and contain his final thoughts on the prophetic, the shamanistic and the aesthetic dimensions of his craft, as well as his own life, characterized by the Portuguese proverb that “God writes straight with crooked lines.” The interviews, accompanied by selected poems, were conducted, edited and introduced by Clifton Ross and were first published two years after the poets death by Stride Publications, UK, republished by Freedom Voices to honor the centennial of the poet’s birth. $14.95

“Clif Ross is among the most highly respected activists of the Left
Coast… His own poetry, a generation of works, is here warmly presented
in the context of a maturation of tone and voice that is quietly
remarkable--and very much like himself. Ross is a fusion of a lyric
realism and the power of metaphor. His voice isn't of the plosive kind.
He writes an organic lyric, resisting any attempt on the part of the
"Poet" in himself to overcome himself by a kind of verbal oblivion. His
poems are expressions of his determination that friendship triumphs
through beautiful communications that make one feel solidarity without
feeling one's being indoctrinated or recruited.”Jack Hirschman
Poet Laureate of San Francisco
from the introduction to the English edition.

Canto de las Moscas (Song of the Flies), by the late Colombian poet María Mercedes Carranza, was published for the first time in 1997, following a decade marked by extremely high levels of violence in Colombia. At this point the country had already endured nearly half a century of armed struggle between government and rebel groups, and had more recently experienced the emergence of paramilitary forces and warring drug lords.

Carranza wrote these twenty-four poems, each bearing the name of a town or city that had been the site of large-scale violence, as a sort of chronicle and commemoration of the tragedies the people endured. The titles reflect a contradiction characteristic of Colombian reality: the beautifully-musical and whimsical place-names stand in cruel contrast to the events that marked them as massacre sites. Written in a form similar to Japanese haiku but not adhering to its strict line-and-syllable counts, the poems are short and spare.

This collection of poetry and prose tells the story of one man's liberation. Reading it, we join him as he spirals outward from the sound of the word, to the sound of the street, from a story of everyday life, to the inner magic of creative transcendence. His love of language and of people vibrates almost musically on each page. Stuart finds himself always out of sync. Offbeat. . . articulating hope in a place where sleeping on the streets is as common as being housed.